Politics as Sportscenter: How Unserious Approaches to American Politics Harm Marginalized Citizens
Politics as Sportscenter: How Unserious Approaches to American Politics Harm Marginalized Citizens
Happy Juneteenth
Unsurprisingly, American politics is increasingly viewed as a televised sporting event rather than a vital democratic activity. Television’s growing influence has led to an immense obsession with instant information and instant gratification while contributing to civic laziness. At the same time, television brought the nation together, helped create a national culture, and planted seeds in former American backwaters that urged those regions and the people within them to advance, move out of their comfort zones, and join modern life. Still, the dark side of this development is the ongoing unseriousness and sense of apathetic detachment that plague our civic participation, political discourse, and the struggle to maintain human rights for marginalized groups.
Television has remained an ongoing influence over modern audiences for generations. Like most new technologies, people feared how they would impact the public. Yet, this technology has brought the wonders of film into the living rooms of Americans. Conversely, it also brings home the medium’s ability to influence narratives and create unabashed propaganda. This has spread onto the evolving platforms of the World Wide Web. Thus, the movement toward viewing politics as a sporting event being superficially commentated on can harm the entire public. That trend does double the damage to marginalized groups within that public.
The history of increasing reverence towards the public square, a literal and metaphorical space for the entire public to enrich itself, has also paralleled the growing enfranchisement of Black citizens. Americans who struggle to create democracy can form coalitions with other concerned Americans that shed light on lapses in representation and lapses in human rights regarding the entire populace. But when propaganda campaigns successfully demonize the public square and perpetuate stereotypes about outgroups, then you have an exponential increase in societal harms that follow.
Fox News and other right-wing media figures have been on the warpath to demonize Juneteenth. Charlie Kirk has been one of those figures. Recently, Kirk was joined by President Trump right after the Trump campaign engaged in another superficial attempt to speak to Black voters, this time in Detroit.
Former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick supported that effort, but likely because Trump pardoned his crimes.
It’s notable that after Trump’s church visit, he immediately went to support Charlie Kirk, who has called Juneteenth a neo-segregationist federal holiday. Kirk has also tweeted that the holiday is about creating a “summertime, race-based competitor two weeks before July 4th, which should be the most unifying civic holiday on the calendar.”
Kirk is part of a massive infotainment complex built by right-wing dollars to lure potential voters and thought leaders away from a mainstream conversation and into an echo chamber that repeats racial stereotypes, debunked studies, and outright lies until they become truth for the uninitiated (meaning most Americans who are not plugged into politics). The way this rhetoric is trafficked becomes the groundwork for policy projects that eviscerate voting rights, roll back reproductive rights, and misinterpret the Second Amendment to create a gun-saturated nation rife with mass shootings. It is just as much on mainstream media outlets who legitimize these talking points and stances out of fear of being called liberal or fear of losing access.
In this manner, politics has become like watching Sportscenter for too many Americans, which means developing a detached, unserious approach to what people say or argue on influential networks. The collatoral damage of these developments is a downgraded public life, jeopardized civic health, and the loss of previous protections for citizens who do not have significant social or financial wealth.
Kirk is also on the record as an opponent of diversity, equity, and inclusion, as he has shared his fear of being on a plane with a Black pilot.
On the Fox News side, Tucker Carlson was once considered a respected intellectual by center-right Americans. Before he was thrown off the network, he engaged in a campaign to delegitimize Juneteenth. Carlson said, “No one had heard of it just last year and everyone of course already forgotten about it.” Carlson was part of the campaign to criticize Juneteenth as an attempt by Black Americans and their allies to replace July 4th. His primetime Fox show was very popular for the genre.
One valid criticism is that the holiday is built out of good intentions. Still, it depicts an income and educational divide in America because employees in the service industry and some other blue-collar professions may still have to work. In contrast, white-collar employees get an extra day off, with July 4th right around the corner. The demand for service jobs increases as the white-collar group plans events, uses more energy at home, or decides to take a trip. This is not the argument being made here, though, as the right-wing media is engaged in a propagandistic attempt to bastardize Black contributions and history.
We can expect forces on the right (and, by extension, the Republican Party) to gin up racial hatred for political gain. However, the existence of a media system that allows them to traffic in heinous rhetoric and then go unchallenged is a significant reason for our nation’s collective step backward in the realm of human rights, civic development, and multiracial democracy. The growing view of politics as a sports match between red and blue (and the polarization that causes) puts our democracy in peril.
But, in my opinion, it is a chicken-and-egg scenario.
Is it the media’s fault?
Or is it the fault of Americans who have created a market for mindless entertainment as we relish in a widespread comfort (and stasis) that this global giant has successfully given a plurality of the nation? (A plurality but not all, with many people still living at or under the poverty line.)
By viewing policy and politics as unserious or something that will always be a shameless given, we also make the wrong interpretation that our rights and democracy will always be a given. Sure, a Potemkin news host traffics in Nazi language, but it’s easy to believe that it doesn’t change anyone’s daily life (until legislation makes it harder to vote). Sure, a right-wing news network that was godfathered by mainstream media has been spreading lies non-stop 24/7. But it’s easy to believe that doesn’t matter in our actual lives (until a blatant narcissus who tried to stage an internal American coup still has a grip on 40% of the nation after the fact because his lies are repeated incessantly by that still-taken-seriously-by-CNN-and-NYT right-wing news network.)
Politics isn’t just a Packers-friendly host debating a Ravens-friendly host; thus, if one engages in bad-faith hijinks, the stakes don’t matter. Our national discourse determines how we are ruled and whether we have a say. Television’s darkest contribution to our society is how it can manipulate people into looking at presidential terms as a season of a reality TV show rather than a change of an era regarding our political consensus and civic priorities. The people who are harmed by this unseriousness are the people who need a functioning, non-reality TV-obsessed public to take the protections created by previous generations seriously as they shield marginalized citizens from behaviors, cultural pathologies, and institutions that were built to exploit and destroy their humanity.
